Be more productive: Pomodoro technique for the win!

Hello everyone! I hope everyone is safe and well in this trying times.

I want to talk about Pomodoro technique and how you can adapt it to your teams in this article.

Pomodoro Technique is a time management method in which you work for 25 minutes followed by a 5 minute break.

The name has an interesting story. Pomodoro means ‘tomato’ in Italian. When Francesco Cirillo, the inventor of the method, was a university student, he used a tomato shaped kitchen timer and therefore the name later remained as Pomodoro!

I always find this story very inspiring because it reminds me the importance of simplicity and that sometimes overthinking can be very limiting in our lives. The technique itself is also very simple and highly effective when working especially in our line of work.

Sometimes when we have to do something like solving a problem or accomplishing an objective, it can be very overwhelming and we tend to postpone it from time to time. But when you break down your problem or objective into little pieces, you’ll find out that it‘s’ not that hard as you may think it is. This is where Pomodoro technique comes in handy.

This is how it works:

1. Choose a task.
2. Set your timer to 25 minutes.
3. Take a 5 minute break when the timer rings.
4. Every 4 Pomodoro, take a 15 to 30 minute long break.

That’s all.

So what are the benefits of this technique?

• It helps you focus deeply in a short time on an important task.
• It prevents burnout from working for too long.
• It’s a good way to inform your teammates that you are concentrated on a task and hopefully it prevents being interrupted during you are focused.
• It makes your work more efficient since you start scheduling your tasks and shows you how much you spend on which task.

These are the most observed pros of this technique when you do a quick search on the internet. But who knows? You may discover a whole new bunch of benefits for your work system when you give it a try.

Especially now, because of this pandemic, most of us are working from home. We’re trying to discover and adapt new challenges of working remotely every day. We are all trying to get things done in between online meetings. We can’t deny the psychological effects of this pandemic and I personally find it very hard to concentrate on a task. We, as the crew of Kod Gemisi, have been using this technique for a long time now and personally it really helped me focus on the tasks that I have been avoiding quite some time. That’s why we decided to develop a plugin for Jira in order to adapt it to our daily lives more efficiently.

We present you Domat Pomodoro for Jira plugin. It is offered just for Cloud now but we are working on a Server version as well. It is a free plugin so you can install and start using it. Domat is a shorter version of the word ‘domates’ which also means ‘tomato’ in Turkish :)

So how do we use this plugin? When you are working on an issue, you see the Domat indicator on the issue detail view.

All you have to do is click on the start button and your pomodoro begins.

After 25 minutes of countdown, you get a notification that your pomodoro is done. When a pomodoro is finished, a worklog is automatically generated and you can change the details of the worklog if you like.

You can also see how many pomodoros you’ve completed for that specific issue:

Another benefit of this plugin is that you can see which of your teammates are in Pomodoro and which ones are not. This will help you avoid disturbing people when they are focused and also prevent others disturbing you. Also you can see who was online and active on Jira in the last 10 minutes.

As I said, we’ve been using this technique and find it very helpful. I hope this plugin helps you and your team to adapt to Pomodoro technique as well!